As the Business Improvement District (BID) in Harrogate, we’re always looking for new ways to enhance and develop the services, events and campaigns that we offer in our town.
We’re continuing our work the data firm HUQ, which provides us with constant figures that we can use to plan and progress in the future. We often share this with our partners and include it in our monthly BID newsletter.
We use the data to not only evidence a return on investment for our members, but to show the success of any celebration, trail or other event we host and organise.
The HUQ team suggest that the data covers 98% of the population, obtaining the data sets using a person’s mobile phone signal and location services on various apps. The sets are broken down into categories titled footfall, density, granular catchment, dwell time and demographics.
As we’re now more than halfway into 2024, we’d like to provide a brief overview of some of the data from the year and explain how we use it.
Footfall
The footfall data allows us to view the number of unique people observed within the BID area each day. This is not a ‘busyness’ metric, as more people over a shorter period of time will feel a lot busier than the same over a longer period. If a person exits and re-enters the specified area on the same day, they will only be counted once, as the data is formed through location settings on a person’s mobile phone.
So far in 2024 (up until early August), we can see that the total footfall has been more than eight million at 8,045,803.
The highest footfall in one day so far in 2024 was recorded on Sunday, January 14th at 81,131. Meanwhile, the lowest daily footfall was recorded on Friday, February 2nd at 8,866.
After doing some research, it seems to be a trend nationally that footfall is down on previous years, especially 2023. For example, in June 2024 retail footfall was down 2.3% across the UK, which was a slight improvement on May 2024 when footfall was down 3.6%.
Density
The density data allows us to track the movement of people in the BID area, creating a map to show the most frequently visited sites. We can then use this data to plan locations of events to ensure they are in high footfall areas and will be spotted easily by visitors.
So far in 2024, the ‘hot spot’ areas of Harrogate are shown as Cambridge Crescent, Station Parade, Cambridge Street and James Street – all located within the town centre.
Catchment
Granular catchment allows us as the BID team to observe where Harrogate’s visitors are coming from. Their home locations are organised at postcode district level, which is then used to create the visualisation on the map.
The data from 2024 shows us that people have travelled from all over the UK to visit Harrogate, with locations highlighted in England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland.
Using the figures, we can see people have travelled to visit Harrogate from as far as:
- Mold in Wales,
- Stenhousemuir, Coatbridge and Erskine in Scotland,
- Mossley and Belfast in Northern Ireland
- Redruth, Littlehampton, Hailsham, Hold, Blyth and Ulverston in England.
Meanwhile, the top five postcodes people have travelled from in 2024 so far are HG1, HG2, HG4, HG3 and YO61.
Dwell Time
The dwell time figures show how long visitors are spending in the BID area. This is calculated using the average number of minutes people are spending in the town centre, and it allows us to see how time spent varies on different days across specified time periods.
The average dwell time figures in 2024 show that people spent the most time within the BID area on a Thursday, with an average of 2 hours and 40 minutes, with Wednesday in a close second with visitors spending an average of 2 hours and 29 minutes in the area on this day.
Meanwhile, and somewhat surprisingly, visitors spent the least amount of time in Harrogate on a Sunday, with an average of 1 hour and 40 minutes.
Demographics
The latest addition to the BID’s HUQ dashboard is ‘Demographics’ – which was only added within the last few months. This allows the team to see the age group and gender of each unique visitor, again supporting us when planning future events and creating a target audience for our campaigns.
We can see that people over the age of 60 have been the most frequent visitors to the BID area in 2024 so far, with 33.4% within this age group. Meanwhile, the lowest was between the ages of 15 and 29 at 18.5%
In terms of gender, it’s pretty much an even split! Visitors so far in 2024 have been 50.9% female and 49.1% male.
The data in some section of the HUQ dashboard can be broken down into the ‘purchasing power’ of different groups, which is calculated by the affluency in the area of their home address, or the address their location services are most often at. This can be split into high, medium or low and again can help us with target audiences for events and campaigns.